


This Reoccurring Evening

by WonderAss



Category: Red Dead Redemption
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Depression, Drama, Emotional Baggage, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, References to Canon, Single POV, Spoilers, Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-13
Updated: 2019-01-13
Packaged: 2019-10-09 08:01:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17403110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WonderAss/pseuds/WonderAss
Summary: It's taken the Marstons one impossible step after another to finally find a place to call home.The past, however, is always creeping close behind: one evening Abigail glimpses the deeper doubts and scars beneath her husband's rough exterior.





	This Reoccurring Evening

**Author's Note:**

> Song Inspiration: "Too Much" by Sampha

She'd become accustomed to all sorts of sounds over the years.

The pop of gunshots. The whistle of an unforgiving wind, always too close and ruffling any tent she was lucky enough to sleep in. Fights and squabbles at an early hour, from camp members with blood on their hands and blood on their minds. Fights and squabbles at an early hour, among the wolves or coyotes that crept somewhere in the dark. Life wasn't kind to women. It was even _less_ kind to whores. _That was that_ , she'd supposed before she started bleeding once a month. That was just...that. These were the sounds of her life, from now until that pop from a gun or a slurred curse from a man. Perhaps both.

Her John...oh, he gave her so much more than he _realized_.

Now she wakes up to the sighs of cows in the morning. The call of sheep and the chatter of birds, a lively bickering she's always too late to, and that's just fine. At first it had all startled her stiff. Waking up in a bed had been quaint enough -- no rocks poking into her back, no nosy insects to flick off her dress -- but not _so_ hard to overcome, after a week or two. Something about relaxed muscles has a way of convincing even the nastiest of habits to die _quick_. Smooth floorboards beneath her feet, slices of dawn over her eyes...yes, she got used to those rather quick, too, if she's feeling boastful.

She's wrestled drunk men twice her size off her and stabbed the ones that refused to stop. She's ran with outlaws, kept her head in crossfires and done what many mothers couldn't lay claim to: survived giving birth. Uncle's lumbering gait creaking every last loose board in the house she can most certainly manage, even though there's never a missed opportunity to tell him to _step lighter, damn it, some of us is trying to sleep_. Jack, on the other hand, is near silent as a cat. Rufus, well. A dog can't help being boisterous and noisy, and honestly, she's grown to love the clatter of his nails on the hardwood, too. Even that occasional bark quickly hushed by her son as he cooks his own breakfast in the wee hour, free from her deadly touch. As for John, well...

He's usually outside and hard at work, well before she's cracked one eye open. For nearly three months since they started their new honest, decent life this has held true and, stubborn man he is, it likely won't change. Likely not ever.

Abigail pauses in braiding her midnight hair, staring at the loop of brown circling her index finger like a yarn thread. Maybe she's not being fair.

A year or two ago she wouldn't have thought it possible, but...it's true. John Marston -- orphaned and outlaw, the son of killers -- has transformed before her very eyes from an angry, stubborn, sometimes _pathetic_ man into...into something she's not quite sure she has the words for. Even if it hadn't been quite as smooth as the magical flowers and noble creatures in Jack's books, it was still, somehow, just as powerful. No... _more_ so. She'd never cared much for storybook heroes, anyway -- there's a reason they're kept confined in the pages -- and for far too long she was certain he would end up no different. It wouldn't be old age or sickness. Just an impulsive, noble act for some traveler on the side of the road or because some man sent a horrible word her way...impulsively, nobly bleeding out in the dirt at her feet.

While he most certainly _bled_ on behalf of her and Jack, all the times John got back up and dusted himself off he...changed. A little more here, a little more there. Oh, she wishes she were more poetic sometimes! Arthur would have no doubt found a quaint way to phrase his change (if he didn't just scoff and shrug at the notion, that is). His change hadn't been what she'd expected, and _gotten_ , from so many men. Not Dutch's dismissive, lofty promises. Not the oily assurances of drunkards with only one thing on their mind for the night. John changed, and the world changed with him. In transforming himself...he transformed _her_.

Now her mornings see her not shifting out of a musty bedroll, but strolling through the halls of a warm cabin that smells like wood and old coffee. The wind has to knock if it's let in, now. Insects keep themselves in the floorboards...mostly.

A cup of tea will help the rest of the evening go down. Hair now in a proper plait Abigail shuffles on her nightgown, then leaves their bedroom behind, walking past Uncle's snoozing form on the couch. As the kettle bubbles she savors all the little sounds of her new life. Jack _should_ be in bed now (probably sneaking in one more chapter). She pulls out a teabag, as much as she'd rather have some of her usual black coffee. Guess that's one habit she hasn't left behind, herself. It's a new life well-tailored, Abigail thinks as she watches the steam cloud grow, just before she hears something she's never quite heard before. Here or anywhere.

...Crying. Someone's crying.

It doesn't sound like Uncle. Not that she's heard the old coot cry a day in his mysterious _life_ , but she supposes it's possible, though probably not without a few beers, first. It could be Jack. Abigail sighs and pulls the kettle off the stove the second it threatens to whistle. The boy should be in bed! She opens her mouth to call out...then thinks better of it. No. No, this is unusual. Maybe snapping him out of it would just make it worse. Close him up. As much as John and Jack differ, that's one frustrating area they share more often than not.

In her haste she overfills the cup, hissing when droplets of hot water flick onto her fingers. The sounds of the house may be music to her ears, but they'll have to wait another time. Abigail shuffles as quietly as possible out of the kitchen, minding her near-overflowing cup of tea and stepping around the dips in the floorboards in a crooked dance. The closer she gets to Jack's room, though, the further away the sound becomes. ...That's also odd. She reaches out a hand for his doorknob, then just presses her ear to the door and listens. It's quiet as a mouse inside. Not so much as a hasty shuffle of sheets. He's fast asleep, all right.

...Oh.

Abigail turns and heads straight to the door, pausing only to consider her plaid coat still draped over a kitchen chair from dinner. She shakes her head. This isn't the sort of thing that can wait. Even for a _second_. When her feet touch the porch's cold wood and she catches just how much evening is left over the hills, all the warmth from her day goes up in smoke.

John's slumped on the far porch chair, head bowed over his knees and weeping like he'd never had a good thing happen in his life.

"...John?"

His head whips up, startled as a snake. Abigail looks down at his dirty work jeans and the half-smoked cigarette, then his discarded gloves, then his face. She's...never heard this before, not like _this_ , and she's...never seen his eyes so puffy, his cheeks so red and streaked. Hell, his own son probably didn't even know he  _could_ shed a tear. The man fixes his mouth to speak, but nothing comes out and his mouth just crumples, another sob scraping out. His head bows down again, hands grip into helpless, shaking fists. Her stout John, who returned from near death atop a mountain face groaning and growling the pain away. Tough, angry, loyal John Marston, who's been shot and mauled and stabbed. Her knight in shining armor...blubbering worse than Jack when Rufus got bit.

...She's speechless. Even though she shouldn't be, she really, truly is.

"John? John..." She sets her tea down and sinks with it onto the floor, ignoring the cold bite through the cotton. "Why are you crying...?"

It don't seem right. She's hardly even started and these words feel like...like a poultice on a gaping wound, inappropriate. _Insulting_. His shoulders won't stop shaking. He won't stop heaving these rasping sobs, from his very core, it seems like. The last she saw John cry was many years back, a snatched tear after the kind of bad day that only could be washed away by a good drink. It'd been so quick she thought she'd imagined it, come morning, and even now looks back on with that sort of fuzziness some memories get after a lot of time has passed. Abigail shifts forward a hair, enough to kneel between his knees and nudge his slumped arms out of the way. Reaches up and takes his wet cheeks.

" _John_."

It's almost too dark to see, but she feels him lift his head, just a little, and his next words make her want to cry, too:

"Why _me?_ "

Abigail's mouth twists. She leans up and pushes her forehead against his, right where the sweat of the day hasn't quite left his brow. John grasps her wrist with one hand, pushing back harder than he ever has before. He's not quite sobbing now, but he shakes on the inhale, sucking each breath in like it'll be his last.

"I would've..." It's almost impossible to understand him. His voice crackles like water on stones, raspy and stuttering. "I would've, without question..."

The front door whines open. Abigail doesn't move, but she flicks one hand for Uncle to go back inside. As much as she hates to say it, this needs to happen. This is good for him. For _them_ , even.

"You would've what?" She asks. When he doesn't respond, just shakes and shudders, she repeats, as firm as she can be with her chest burning. "You would've what, John?"

John sucks in air again, through his teeth. Trying to reign it back.

" _Died_."

She gulps in a breath of her own. 

"What...what do you mean?"

"I would've died. ...I would've died for any _one_ of them." He tries to move his face, but she keeps him there. Stubborn man, putting this off for so long. John sinks into her grip, almost immediately, like that was all it was. "I would've...without question. Without hesitation. But I'm here. I'm still here and all of them, gone in a flash. Talking one moment and..." His voice crackles again, blisters and pops like a struggling campfire, and hot tears pool between the curves of her fingers. "...being _buried_ the next."

It's something she...suspected, in a way. She didn't have the words for it -- she's accepted she'll never quite have the flair for words Jack does or Dutch had -- but it was _felt_. A little here and a little there. Like a morning creak beneath her feet, abruptly loud and abruptly quiet. John never talked about Arthur. Not when he could help it. He'd gotten snippy when she mentioned to Jack what the man did for them all those years back, when fleeing the gang had been the only option other than death. She'd been sewing, Jack lost in one of his endless novels. It'd hurt to hear, she'll admit it. Why would he just throw away the man's memory like that, not even giving his own _son_ the opportunity to remember how he got here?

She'd tried to figure him out, but John had already shut tighter than a mousetrap in that ridiculous way of his. Grouchy and distant and talking about some chore or another that needed doing, then. The only thing she remembered better than her own hurt was the hunch of his back as he stormed out into the afternoon sun.

Now he's keening like a wounded animal. Keening and _groaning_ with it, hunching down low and working down the scream from somewhere in his chest. She stopped doing this long ago, but right now she almost feels the urge to slap him. Slap him silly for keeping quiet about this pain, a pain nobody should have to bear, much less silently! After _all_ he's done for her, all he's risked, and he burrows himself away in a hovel of grief and regrets? It's a little awkward to do, with him so tall, but she loops her arms around his shoulders and holds him as close as she's able. Far away in her mind, where it don't matter nearly as much as the man breaking apart before her, she thinks this is some form of hibernation. Him and his pain have slept, for a _long_ time, and now it's waking back up.

"He always, always stuck his neck out for me." John doggedly tries to talk around the misery, the teeth that keep grinding together and yanking that howl back out of reach. "He always...when we got jumped by Cornwall and his...before that, when I was on that mountain and the wolves got me, _he_..." His hand slides down her bare arm, grips it hard enough to hurt. "...he gave me his _hat_."

She knows. When he'd stumbled up to her at Copperhead Landing she couldn't have confused it for anyone else's, even blinded by joy she was that he'd risen from the dead again.

"Hosea..." He starts, then trails off. She doesn't feel any more tears, even though his grimace is printed into the crook of her shoulder. " _Hosea..._ "

Now her own eyes get hot. Hot and miserable with the regrets _she's_ tucked away herself, for Jack and his sake. She still blames herself for running, even though that's what Hosea told her to do when the Pinkertons reared their filthy little heads. Even though that's what he wanted, she still wondered...what would have happened if she stayed.

"I didn't even want them to...to find me, in that jail. I didn't want them to get shot for _me_. Not _anymore_." Now John curses. Spits out like a glob of blood. "Damn her. Damn _him_. Goddamn...pair of..."

Abigail nods. Closes her eyes and sways him a little from side-to-side, like some mothers do their loved ones. No...she would've died if she'd stayed. She knew that and she _knows_ that. Hosea had died a rotten death, Lenny had died a rotten death. John had been lucky, so lucky, to get out like he did.

"Why me? Abigail, just, _why_...I'm not saying I want to leave you and Jack, just what did I _do_ to outlive them all...outlive them _all?_ Life ain't fair, it never will be, but it don't make sense. It don't make sense..."

No. Life really don't. Abigail pets his hair, almost as long as he used to wear it back during the Van der Linde's heyday. Cleaner. Just as soft. She kisses near his ear, so he can feel and hear how damn much she loves him, _all_ of him, even the parts he wants to try and bury. She lets her lips linger on his cheek's knotwork, smooth-then-soft wolf claws. Just one of many times he almost slipped right through his fingers and took with him a dream. Their dream.

"I wasn't...I wasn't like Arthur. I'll never be like Arthur. He was..." John trails off again. There aren't any words. She knows it. John knows it. "...Shit. I wasn't smart as Lenny, I wasn't...I wasn't gentle and kind like Hosea, I wasn't...I wasn't anything, I ain't _anything_ worth this-"

...No. _No._ Abigail tugs back, holding onto his shoulders now, and looks him in the eye.

"Don't you start, Marston. Don't you _dare_ start."

"I can do what I _damn well want!_ "

In the crack of a whip he's furious, mouth twisted halfway into a snarl and baring his teeth like a wolf. The ache in her chest ramps up, turns _sharp_.

_"You're good women. Good people. The best. You go get that boy...there'll be time for sorrow later."_

"Well, I didn't ask him to save me _either!_ "

Her husband stiffens. Leans back a little in stunned silence. She didn't...and he did, anyway. That horrible day when not a single thing seemed to go right Arthur took her hand in his, every breath a death rattle, and sent her away with _hope_. Unlike John, she never even asked.

"You're not the only one who's loved and lost." The night freezes the woe to her cheeks, one river at a time. "So you stop feeling like you were their last big mistake."

"I-" John's shoulders bob weakly. Helplessly. "I-"

"No. Stop it. _Enough_." She winds fingers through that dark, shaggy hair, pressing the pads of her fingers into his scalp to keep him right here with her and not further down that dark, winding road of all his worst thoughts. "I didn't hold fast for so many years to hear you just...throw yourself _away_ like that. Do you know what a lucky woman I am that you're still here? After all we've been through, after so much...you're here, with me and our son, in such a _beautiful_ place?"

He sniffs, the tingle of another one of their usual squabbles simmering beneath the surface now. She can't help but smile. Beecher's Hope is home to two old wounds, leaking through the stitches out all over the porch on a day that couldn't have gone any smoother. Oh, of course it'd be _now_ pain turns her into a poet, and she's never understood the wisdom of that better. Maybe she's been a poet all along. John's brown eyes are shadowed now, the rest of the world begging the both of them to go inside and sleep, but it'll have to wait. For once, it'll have to wait.

"We're blessed, John. Blessed. They loved you. They loved..." Abigail lets go only to wipe away her own tears, long since left her eyes out into the open to make a mockery of all her hard work. "...Damn it. They loved us, John. They loved _us_."

His nod is weak. Barely there. Years and years and years of all this...she knows her words aren't going to soothe it all. She just hopes...he knows. Maybe she can't read and maybe she can't cook. Maybe her only real skill is her sharp tongue: steering those she loves down the right path, again and again until it _finally_ takes. Pushing and shoving if she has to. It's just that now...she doesn't _want_ to be so sharp. Isn't that all they've carried on their backs? He's had too many harsh days and sour words. Abigail chews on her lip and stares over the curve of his shoulder at a lone jay preening itself on the porch railing. Still awake long after all its kin have gone to sleep.

"...Oh, John." She can't help it. It won't do to have him forget, even if it's just for a _second_. "I love you. You know that, right? Tell me you know that."

John is limp straw now. One scarred cheek presses into her shoulder, the rest of him doing little more than shiver in the cold. A few stars have poked out beyond the trees since she stepped out. The scream's died down to nothing. Too tired, maybe...or hibernating again for another evening. Some minutes later he nods, smudging salty tears on her lips and nose.

"...I know."

She scrubs a thumb beneath his eye, right where the scars end and the doubts begin.

"Don't you _ever_ forget that."

"I won't."

"Promise me."

"I promise."

Abigail squeezes her husband as tight as she can. She believes him...but it doesn't hurt to make sure.

She reminds him over breakfast next morning, waking up an hour after him as always and calling out through the window to get his behind to the table. She reminds him with his favorite coffee and a few kisses. One on his ear, one on his (still messy) hair. One for each scar on his cheek. Jack wrinkles his nose and buries his face in his book, annoyed at his silly parents, and Uncle chortles around his food and tells him he'll understand when he's older. Rufus dances at their heels all the while, waiting for special attention of his own.

Eventually John calls her silly. Asks who replaced his wife with such a convincing looking twin, then mutters something around his cup of coffee about a package that should be coming in later in the day. Abigail sees him out to the porch like a proper housewife, because it'll be hours until he comes back inside again, if she's lucky to have him come back at all. Minutes later a package _does_ arrive ahead of schedule: a new toolset, brought all the way to Beecher's Hope by a friendly man named Sam whom they've seen twice before. When she asks if they're finally trading Uncle for something useful, like a bag of grain or a new shovel, John laughs.

That, right there...might be one of her favorite sounds of them all.

**Author's Note:**

> Threw this together the other day. Sometimes, despite all on your plate, you have a little something extra that _needs_ to get out. 
> 
> I love this family.


End file.
